Automatic or automated test equipment (ATE) are required to perform a variety of electrical tests to ensure the functionality of a device under test (DUT) according to its device specifications. For analog devices like analog-to-digital converters (ADC) or radio frequency (RF) devices like mobile phone transceivers, each test may consist of 5 basic processes: setup, capture, upload, calculate, and judgment. During a setup process, the ATE and a connected DUT may be set into a requested test mode. During a capture process, a DUT output is captured by an ATE measurement instrument. During an upload process, the captured data will be uploaded to a post-processing unit. During the calculate process, the results will be calculated in the post-processing unit. Finally, during a judge or judgment process, it will be determined whether the calculated result is within DUT specifications.
FIG. 3 illustrates a plurality of tests performed on a DUT sequentially. For each test respective processes, procedures, or processes are indicated. A communication link (CL) between ATE measurement units and an ATE post-processing unit may be a shared resource: The communication link is used to setup measurement instruments as well as to read back capture results. When the communications link is being used by a currently running test, another test that is ready to run must wait until the DUT output of the previous test is uploaded.
Commonly known systems may use one of two concepts: an ATE may perform the upload and calculation in a serial fashion as illustrated in FIG. 1, or the ATE may use separate dedicated calculation digital signal processing (DSP) units which may necessitate additional hardware links and link management, as illustrated in FIG. 2.